June 18th, 2012 by Josh Linden

Mellanox Technologies has announced Connect-IB, a series of host channel adapter cards which offer up to 100Gb/s, sub-microsecond ltency and 130 million messages per second. Connect-IB is optimized for multi-tenant environments of hundreds of Virtual Machines per server, using PCI Express 3.0 x16 and FDR InfiniBand to offload CPU protocol processing and data movement to the interconnect.

The Connect-IB product line consists of single and dual port adapters for PCI Express 3.0 with options for x8 and x16 host bus interfaces as well as a single port adapter for PCI Express 2.0 x16. Each port supports FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand with MPI ping latency less than 1us. All Mellanox HCAs support CPU offload of transport operations.

Connect-IB Key Features

Greater than 100Gb/s over InfiniBand

Greater than 130M messages/sec

1us MPI ping latency

CPU offload of transport operations

Application offload

GPU communication acceleration

Dynamic Transport operation support

New data operations, including noncontinuous memory transfers

End-to-end QoS and congestion control

Hardware-based I/O virtualization

RoHS-R6

New applications such as Big Data analytics and in-memory computing along with next-generation compute servers like Intel’s Romley benefit from parallel execution and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). Connect-IB adapters will be supported by Windows and Linux distributions and offer OpenFabrics-based RDMA protocols and software.

Availability
Adapter cards are sampling now to select customers; general availability is expected in Q3 2012.